ancient DNA (Other Keyword)
226-239 (239 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Pacific cod (Gadus macrocephalus) was historically an important subsistence item for many Indigenous peoples along the North Pacific Rim including the Ainu of Hokkaido in northern Japan. However, relative to salmon, little archaeological research has been conducted on this taxon. Ethnographic records and oral traditions are also limited as many Ainu were...
Tracking dogs across the Pacific using ancient mitogenomes (2017)
Dogs were introduced to the islands of Australasia and the Pacific during human migrations and colonisations, but the timing and dispersal routes are unclear. To investigate these Oceanic dog introductions and movements, we generated complete or near complete ancient mitochondrial genomes from archaeological dog specimens from Thailand, Island Southeast Asia and Pacific islands, and from modern dingoes. When combined with additional published complete mitogenome sequences from modern dogs from...
Tracking Human Dispersals to Palau Using Ancient DNA: Results from the Chelechol ra Orrak Site (2021)
This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Initial settlement of Remote Oceania represents the world’s last major wave of human dispersal. While transdisciplinary models involving linguistic, archaeological, and biological data have been utilized in the Pacific to develop basic chronologies and trajectories of initial settlement, a number of elusive gaps remain...
Transdisciplinary Analysis of Marine Mammal Use in the Norse North Atlantic and Subarctic (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Celebrating Anna Kerttula's Contributions to Northern Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This ongoing project, funded in 2015 by Anna Kerttula and the Arctic Social Sciences Program, uses historical, literary, aDNA, ZooMS, and archaeological data to identify patterns in marine mammal exploitation across the North Atlantic and Subarctic from ca. 800 -1800 CE. With over 230 samples of archaeological whale bone...
Transdisciplinary Approaches to Norse Use of Marine Mammals: History, Archaeology and aDNA (2017)
Historical, literary and archaeological evidence suggests frequent use of marine mammals by the Norse across the medieval North Atlantic and Eastern Subarctic, circa 870 – 1500 CE. Written records indicate the importance of cetacean species in Norse economies from Norway to Newfoundland, but especially in medieval Iceland. Archaeological assemblages from Iceland reveal an abundance of worked and waste cetacean bone, most of which are morphologically undiagnostic. As such, details on the economic...
Tuberculosis in Past Peruvian Populations (2017)
Due to its arid climate the Atacama Desert has an exceptional preservation of ancient biomolecules. In an archaeological context, this allows for genetic analyses of both past human populations and the infectious diseases they experienced. Pre-contact Peruvian cultures are among the first New World populations to show skeletal indications of tuberculosis, and recent molecular analyses have revealed that three individuals were afflicted with a rare zoonotic form of the disease acquired from...
Turkeys in the Mimbres Valley, New Mexico: Pottery Iconography, Genetics, and Diet (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Birds in Archaeology: New Approaches to Understanding the Diverse Roles of Birds in the Past" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the cultural and environmental context of turkey (*Meleagris gallopavo) domestication and husbandry contribute to key issues in anthropological archaeology and social zooarchaeology. Despite recent advances in turkey studies in recent years, the extent of domestication and...
Turtles all the Way Down: Tracing Long-Term Genetic Change in Southern Caribbean Green Turtle (Chelonia mydas) Populations and Applications to Modern Conservation (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Caribbean sea turtle histories are deeply intertwined with past human activities. While modern DNA offers insight into impacts of recent stressors, to fully support sea turtle recovery we must account for activities acting on populations prior to modern baselines. Ancient DNA (aDNA) research offers a novel method for identifying timing and rate of change...
The Use of Ancient DNA to Investigate Change in Vole Populations during the Past 7,000 years: Implications for Past Land Management Practices (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Insights into Pyrodiversity and Seascape Management on the Central California Coast" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The integration of genetic research on contemporary and ancient organisms into archaeological studies represents a novel approach in the analysis of long-term landscape management practices by small-scale societies. Our project employs methods in genetics (aDNA, phylogeographic research on...
Using DNA to Connect Living People to Enslaved Ironworkers at Catoctin Furnace (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2023, “The Genetic Legacy of African Americans from Catoctin Furnace” was published in Science, demonstrating that it is possible to wed the power of massive direct-to-consumer ancestry databases with ancient DNA technology. Using the first reliable approach for identifying identical-by-descent (IBD) connections between present-day and historical...
Utilizing Ancient Oral Microbes to Track Human Migrations across the Pacific Islands: Insights from Palau and Beyond (2021)
This is an abstract from the "When the Wild Winds Blow: Micronesia Colonization in Pacific Context" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient human migrations underpin the origin of past cultures, health, ecological interactions, and identity. However, recent or rapid migrations are difficult to track using classical demographic tools that monitor human genetic mutations over time. A new method—tracking human migrations by assessing microbial genome...
Validation of a Non-Destructive DNA Extraction Protocol for Ancient DNA Analyses (2015)
The destructive nature of traditional DNA extraction techniques presents one of the primary obstacles to accessing genetic information from museum and archaeological collections. Here we assess a recently published "non-destructive" DNA extraction protocol by Bolnick and colleagues in terms of the amount and quality of DNA extracted from a set of samples of even greater antiquity than those tested in the original analysis. DNA was successfully extracted from archaic period samples from the Eva...
We just need a few milligrams.... (2018)
Destructive analyses of human remains, i.e. analyses dependent on small biological samples from human, archaeologically found, bone or teeth, have yielded important new data and added to knowledge about our past. Yet, more studies generate even more studies, and the demand is clearly rising for more samples made available. This is especially the case for those collections, which are very unique in terms of geography (Greenland) or time period (Danish mesolithic). At the same time, these unique...
Were Turkeys Domesticated by Prehistoric Farmers in Oklahoma? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Research on Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) Domestication, Husbandry and Management in North America and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Turkeys (Meleagris gallopavo) were domesticated by Basketmaker peoples in the American Southwest and independently by prehispanic Mesoamerican groups, yet relatively little is known about the nature and origin of ancient Oklahoma turkeys. In this project, we analyze...